Tell me then... What would be the point of buying or owning an Apple computer?
The point?! As in what would be the point of buying a premium car like Audi or BMW when you can buy a Saturn? Come to think of it why buy a Saturn when you can drive a rusty Gremlin or Pacer? Yeah, why do brands like Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Volvo and Saab sell so much as a single car when there are cheaper alternatives?
Because these cars are associated with status, luxury and quality, and people who can afford them will buy them. People who can't afford them will dream of them at night.
When Honda created the Acura brand people said "pffffft uhhhh yah right AS IF someone would pay more for a stupid Honda with extra mayo on". Well, I guess Honda got the last laugh because now we have Nissan's Infiniti and Toyota's Lexus too.
Apple has the strongest brand loyalty of all computer manufacturers and that's not going to change just because Dell or whoever were to offer machines with OS X installed. Apple fans would rather die than be caught with a Dell laptop, not only because of its association with Windows but because it's a Dell.
There will always be people who will be willing to pay to get the real deal, the premium machine with the sleek design, the aluminium enclosure, the backlit keys and the big Apple logo, rather than have some plastic brick from Dell.
No, the idea here is to reach out with OS X to those who wouldn't buy an Apple computer anyway because they can't afford one or don't think it's worth the premium even though they would prefer OS X. Let's say you're starting up a small business and you're buying 50 laptops for your employees. Let's say it's a tossup between OS X or Windows, you could go either way. You find that 50 MacBooks will set you back $54,950. Then you take a look at Dell's Vostro series for small businesses and discover that 50 of those with the same specs as the MacBooks will set you back only $26,450. You're going to take the Vostro route, period. So which of these options is better for Apple in the long run? A) The 50 Vostros ship with Vista and Office installed. B) The 50 Vostros ship with OS X and iWork installed.
Yes, Apple would lose
some hardware sales due to cheapskates, but OS X getting a foothold in places where it didn't stand a chance before will make up for it and then some.
as much as i want os x for pcs i still think apple wont do that, thats like offering the iphone os x for other mobile phones
...which would be a giant billboard for the real iPhone because no cellphone manufacturer has come close to offering a touchscreen that good. Go out and try any phone, any GPS unit and see if it will register a light touch of a fingertip. Nope, you need a stylus and sometimes you have to press 2 or 3 times to make it stick. I recently bought a top-of-the-line Navigon 8110, brushed stainless steel with all the bells and whistles and then some. But the touchscreen turned out to be more of a "punchscreen"; being accustomed to my iPod Touch, suddenly all these devices feel like something out of the 1980's.
How do you think Microsoft does it? They certainly don't write drivers for every device on the market; that's the manufacturers job. As far as stability goes, that argument died around 8 years ago with Windows 2000. I'd venture to say that you could compare up times for Windows, OS X, and Linux and see very little difference.
Frankly, the "stability" argument has been busted for a long time. You're referring to Windows 95/98, and if you want to go that route we can start comparing Mac OS 9 to either of those and the comparison wouldn't do Apple any favors stability-wise.
I pretty much agree, though you gotta admit the transition to Vista was a little shaky. Mostly due to the fact that Vista introduced a whole new driver model which would eventually result in improved stability (no more BSoD) once all hardware drivers had been rewritten, but it took a while to get there -- many initial releases included with Vista were crap. But it's very stable now and I barely ever reboot my PCs, I just put them in hybrid sleep mode. The one I'm typing on right now hasn't been rebooted for over a month. The same can certainly not be said about my iMac...
But I think it's important to acknowledge that Microsoft fessed up to stability issues long ago and have built a lot of stuff into Windows to help address these problems. They've had System Restore for many years, they've had detailed error reporting etc, and the "Problem Reports and Solutions" logger built into Vista is quite remarkable. OS X on the other hand basically refuses to acknowledge that problems are even on the map, so when a Mac crashes it does so in classic Win95/98 style with a brief and cryptic error message and that's that, and if you run into major issues it's back to the old Neanderthal method, "archive/reinstall". Apple has some serious pride issues to get over.
